Guaranteed Healthcare

By Donna Smith

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania – This day began in the drizzle and cold wind of Pittsburgh where members of the CNA/NNOC road show team appeared at Carnegie Mellon University to join in a panel to educate citizens and students about single payer healthcare reform.  Geri Jenkins, RN, and CNA President, joined Congressman Mike Doyle, D-PA14, and Congressional candidate Steve O’Donnell, D-PA18, and many others to not only explain the ins and outs of single payer, publicly funded, privately delivered healthcare but also to acknowledge that the work of passing single payer legislation will need even more energy and passion following the November elections.

Geri was a powerful advocate – as usual – for the kind of change that RNs know must come.  Congressman Doyle is one of the congressional co-sponsors of HR676, the National Health Insurance Act, and he pledged to continue his support of single payer legislation with the seating of the new Congress in January.  Doyle told the audience that passing any healthcare reform legislation will not be so easy as some seem to think in the near future.

Audience questions were terrific, and Geri and the Congressman answered every one with all the detail necessary for those present.  It was a great panel, and it is always good for single payer to step onto campuses where conservative thought and practice sometimes keep alternative views at bay. 

But I couldn’t help thinking about all the plotting and planning and emailing and faxing and texting and power-mongering already underway on the issue of healthcare reform.  No matter where we are in citizen discussion and activism, the big money interests are moving right along.

But Washington and the powers that be wait for no one.  The election campaigns have not stopped anyone in the private health insurance and pharmaceutical industries from thundering forward, and the corporations wait with great anticipation for the expansion of their markets if healthcare reform legislation accomplishes signing up millions more new policyholders from whom to collect premiums and from whom to withhold payouts of claims whenever possible.  No other American industry, save the banks and financial services folks basking in the blush of bailout riches, can expect such handsome protections from downward market forces as the for-profit health insurance folks who are looking forward to an embarrassment of riches in the coming months and years unless someone grows some guts somehow and refuses to capitulate to their pressures.